Category Archives: Rick Wright

Post navigation

VENT tour leader Rick Wright, the designer of VENT’s Birds & Art tour program, will lecture on “Sparrows and People and Sparrow People” at New York City Audubon, Tuesday, February 27, 2018 at 7:00 p.m.

Rick is the author of two books on the Latin and German animal literature of the late Middle Ages and several birding field guides. He is a prolific contributor to the birding literature and a sought-after lecturer.

Halloween seems a good time to recall that nightjars, those mysterious nocturnal flutterers, have been rumored to engage in behavior far more treacherous than merely suckling at the udders of defenseless livestock.

In 1750, the Pomeranian ornithologist Jacob Theodor Klein listed as names for the European nightjar “witch,” “night harmer,” and something that seems to mean “child smotherer.”

Some of us may have our doubts, but the terrifying engraving that accompanies Klein’s account convinces me. Myself, I’m keeping the windows closed until Halloween is over.

Franco Andrea Bonelli—of warbler and eagle fame—had the great good luck and the singular misfortune to live in what one might call interesting times.

Portrait of Franco Bonelli by G. B. Biscarra.

Bonelli was born in the Italian Piedmont in 1784. When he was a boy of 14, Napoleon’s troops moved into northern Italy, occupying the Piedmont and driving the royal family into exile on Sardinia.

National Museum of Natural History, Paris. Photo by Roi Boshi.

The French occupation, which would last fifteen years, was a great setback for the burgeoning movement for Italian unity and independence, but it also presented new opportunities to young and ambitious Piedmontese—among them Bonelli, who, with Georges Cuvier’s sponsorship, was able to spend a year studying at the National Museum in Paris, from which he returned in 1811 to take up a position as professor of zoology in Turin.

Among the young professor’s tasks was seeing to it that the city’s museum become a resource for university instruction in natural history. In his tenure, Bonelli did far more: he made Turin the finest museum in Italy, the repository of collections that would be visited by nearly every famous natural historian of his day.

But there was trouble ahead. On Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, the Italian royal family returned from Sardinia. The deeply conservative views of the king came together with his resentment of the French to produce a decidedly radical restoration: as one skeptical court insider reported, the Italians had come back from exile with only one thing in mind, to return everything to the status quo of 1798.

Vittorio Emanuele I in 1801, artist unknown.

That meant, of course, destroying every single institution that had been created or promoted by the hated occupiers—including the ornithological collections Bonelli had amassed with the support of Paris. “All of these innovations are the work of Satan,” the king is rumored to have said, “we didn’t have museums in ’98 and we were none the worse for it. Why should we want to be more clever than our forebears?”

Birds to please a king. Photo by Torino Regional Museum of Natural Sciences.

Someone—presumably but not certainly Bonelli himself—reminded the king of the delight he had recently had in visiting the museum’s birds. Once his tantrum had subsided, the king agreed to make an exception for the birds: he liked the birds, and he hoped that the museum staff would continue to take good care of them.

The next regent, Charles Felix, was more indulgent. He gave Bonelli permission to construct a specially designed hall of zoology in the museum, which was completed in the spring of 1830. Unbeknownst to Bonelli, however, a university colleague had been scheming behind the scenes to have the new space instead given to him for anatomy demonstrations. When Bonelli learned of the betrayal, he suffered a stroke, and died six months later, at the age of 45.

But the rich artworks preserved in Ravenna, the capital of Theoderic’s realm, tell a different story.

Consecrated in the late fifth century, the city’s Archepiscopal Chapel is the oldest surviving Christian oratory anywhere. Its marble walls are paved with some of the finest and most famous mosaics in Italy, studded with 1500-year-old images of some 99 species of birds.

Cappella arcivescovile, Ravenna. Photo by Incola, Wikimedia Commons.

Some are purely whimsical, but many of the birds are identifiable as of the very same species that still abound today around the ancient churches and tombs.

Others recall the great numbers and variety of waterfowl, shorebirds, and raptors that winter around the nearby delta of the mighty Po River.

Smew. Photo by Dick Daniels, Wikimedia Commons.

From Venice to Ravenna, we retrace the steps of the Ostrogoths as they slowly absorbed much of the western Roman Empire. And we retrace the steps of the anonymous artists who, 1500 years ago, recognized that there was a lot to see outdoors in Italy, too.

Berlin’s largest urban green space dates to the early sixteenth century, when a royal hunting preserve was gradually transformed into a public park. By the nineteenth century, the Tiergarten district, centered on the forested square mile of this “garden of beasts,” had become the city’s most desirable neighborhood, home to the Prussian nobility, newly wealthy industrialists, and even the odd scholar or two.

The Brothers Grimm

Some of the finest villas are now occupied by government buildings and embassies, as they were in the days leading up to the second World War. Laid waste, like most of Berlin, in the closing days of the war, the Tiergarten is once again a refuge at the very heart of central Europe’s most exciting city—

Berlin – traffic at Tiergarten

—a refuge for human residents and birds alike.

Tufted Duck

The peaceful stroll from the Charlottenburg Gate leads through deep forest and along placid waterways inhabited by all the common birds of those habitats, from noisy Song Thrushes to secretive Northern Goshawks—yes, goshawks, breeding and wintering in the middle of the capital of Germany.

Song Thrush

On my most recent visit to Berlin, I rose early almost every day to head out into the wild marshlands and woods of nearby Brandenburg.

Common Cranes

As wonderful as those days were, the best mornings were those when I lingered abed just a little longer, then crossed the street to the Tiergarten. Those urban goshawks were, as so often, elusive, but my walk, past the Victory Column and the Brandenburg Gate to the Philharmonic and Potsdamer Platz, was lavish in the sight and sound of birds. Chaffinches and Green Woodpeckers bounced across the lawns, while Hawfinches and Wood Warblers ticked and trilled from the trees. It was like Central Park or Garret Mountain or Mount Auburn in May—but with different birds and no crowds.

Tiergarten and Siegessaule

And at the end of my walk through the garden of the beasts, there was coffee and cake and a world-class museum or six. You really can have it all in Berlin. Especially if you’re a birder.

The monastery of Montserrat perches high on a saw-toothed mountain just north of Barcelona, beneath an eerie moonscape of eroded peaks dotted with chapels and ancient hermitages.

The flanks of the mountain are more densely vegetated, covered with maquis-like scrub that offers breeding sites to colorful and noisy Cirl Buntings and Subalpine Warblers.

One of the best places to bird here is the trailhead at the Camí de les Batalles, named for its role as a mustering place for the Catalan troops during the war of Spanish Liberation.

In the summer of 1808, Napoleon’s soldiers were twice rebuffed here, events claimed by the locals to be a turning point in the effort to expel the French. The whole thing is the stuff of patriotic legend: the story goes that when the patriots were badly outnumbered, a local drummer boy hit upon the idea of playing his drum from a deep cleft in the mountainside, the echoes of which convinced the wicked Frenchmen that they were surrounded by a vastly superior force—and like cowards they ran, all the way back to Paris.

Be that as it may or may not have been, the battle at El Bruc was a turning point in another story, the story of American ornithology.

Had the French occupiers prevailed, the usurper King Joseph would not have been forced to abdicate, and he would never have left Spain for England and then, eventually, for America, where his nephew and son-in-law Charles would come to live as well—on the banks of the Delaware River, in central New Jersey, where Charles collected the first Cooper’s Hawk known to science, where he figured out the color morphs of the Eastern Screech-Owl, and where he earned the respect and admiration of naturalist historians who would, for example, name a gull for him, Charles Bonaparte. The centuries and the miles fade away when you’re birding the landscapes of Catalonia.

Whole landscape birding can be practiced anywhere, even, or perhaps especially, where the birds reliably include no rarities or special target species. Take, for example, a little spot on the road between Arles and St-Rémy, in the Alpille hills of southern Provence.

The pine forests here are full of crossbills, and subalpine warblers chatter from the roadside pullouts.

At the bottom of the hills, the road widens, and the sharp-eyed spot a parking lot, from which it is a comfortable 90-second walk to the monumental entrance to the Roman city of Glanum.

While we perch on the stones of the old city wall, our conversations are interrupted again and again by, say, a Common Redstart or a European Roller. Tempting as it is to linger, we stand up and cross the road for a visit to the grounds of the hospital of St-Paul.

St-Paul, of course, is most famous as the institution Vincent van Gogh checked in to after that unfortunate episode with his ear in Arles. At its center, though, is one of the finest little Romanesque cloisters in France, where Black Redstarts and European Robins dart from stone to stone as we admire the carved capitals.

Upstairs, the view from van Gogh’s room ravishes the eye with sights familiar from his paintings: irises, sunflowers, olive groves stretching to the rugged forests of the Alpilles.

Cuckoos sing, martins and swifts swoop and soar overhead, and Crested Tits, the cutest of the whole enchanting lot, feed and fuss beneath the eaves of the ancient buildings.

St-Paul has it all. But without the birds and the art and the archaeology, all taken in at once, it would be just another dutiful stop on the tourist pilgrimage. For open-eyed, open-minded birders, though, it is one of the most special places in the world.